Python Quick Start book now on sale

Python Quick Start is a new Python book for beginners.

It is available from:

• Leanpub
• Amazon

Python is an extremely popular language, and is an excellent choice for first time programmers, because it is simple to get started with, but extremely powerful once you get to know it. Python in the language of choice for machine learning and web development, but is can also be used for anything from system scripts to games to desktop applications. It is also embedded in many existing applications to provide a scripting mechanism, which can be used to automate many applications such as Paintshop or Blender.

This book will help you learn Python whether you are a complete beginner or you already have experience programming in other languages. It teaches all the core features of the language, step by step, with example code, exercises, and solutions.

Foreword
Who is this book for?
About the author
Keep in touch
Introduction
What is Python
History of Python
Zen of Python

1 Getting started with Python
1.1 Installing Python
1.1.1 Windows
1.1.2 Linux
1.2 Running IDLE
1.3 Simple maths in Python
1.4 Variables
1.4.1 Calculations with variables
1.4.2 Changing the value of a variable
1.4.3 Variable names
1.5 Strings
1.5.1 Strings in variables
1.6 Console shortcuts

2 Hello world
2.1 Writing a program
2.1.1 Running the IDLE console window
2.1.2 Opening an edit window
2.1.3 Typing in your code
2.1.4 Type, don’t copy and paste
2.1.5 Running your code
2.1.6 Seeing the result
2.2 In case of errors
2.3 Print statements - outputting text
2.4 Sequencing
2.5 Input statements - getting user input
2.5.1 Inputting a number
2.6 Selection
2.6.1 Indentation
2.7 Iteration
2.8 Comments

3 Variables and values
3.1 Creating and using variables
3.2 Variables can store any type of data
3.3 Naming variables
3.3.1 Legal variable names
3.3.2 Reserved words
3.3.3 Choosing variable names
3.3.4 Naming conventions
3.3.5 Unicode characters
3.4 Variables point to values
3.5 None
3.6 Multiple assignments

4 Numbers and maths
4.1 Types of number
4.1.1 Integers
4.1.2 Floating point numbers
4.1.3 Finding the type
4.2 Basic maths operations
4.2.1 Addition
4.2.2 Int and float results
4.2.3 Subtraction
4.2.4 Multiplication
4.2.5 Division
4.2.6 Power
4.2.7 Floor divide
4.2.8 Modulo
4.2.9 Unary operators
4.2.10 Augmented assignment
4.3 Precedence and brackets
4.3.1 Statements and expressions
4.4 Built-in maths functions
4.4.1 abs()
4.4.2 min() and max()
4.4.3 int()
4.4.4 float()
4.5 math module
4.6 Limitations of floats
4.7 More advanced topics
4.7.1 Scientific notation for floats
4.7.2 Complex numbers

5 Strings
5.1 Creating strings
5.2 String type
5.3 Operations on strings
5.3.1 Methods
5.4 Converting between strings and other data types
5.5 How to use special characters in a string
5.5.1 Quote characters
5.5.2 Unicode characters
5.5.3 Newline characters
5.5.4 The escape character \

6 Loops
6.1 For loops
6.1.1 The loop variable
6.2 The range function
6.2.1 Changing the start value
6.2.2 Using a step value
6.3 For loop example - printing a times table
6.4 While loops
6.5 While loop example - getting user input
6.6 Nested loops

7 Input and output
7.1 Input prompts
7.2 Inputting numbers
7.3 Print
7.4 Print separators

8 If statements
8.1 if statements
8.1.1 Example if statement
8.2 Comparison operators
8.3 Else statement
8.4 Elif statement
8.5 Compound conditions
8.6 Comparison operator chaining
8.7 Precedence

9 Lists
9.1 What is a list?
9.1.1 Lists vs arrays
9.2 Creating lists
9.2.1 Empty lists
9.2.2 The list function
9.3 The list type
9.4 Accessing list elements
9.4.1 Reading an element
9.4.2 Changing an element
9.5 Operations on lists
9.6 Looping over a list
9.6.1 Doing calculations in a loop
9.7 List functions
9.7.1 Finding the length of the list
9.7.2 Finding the min a max values
9.7.3 Adding up the values in a list
9.8 List methods
9.8.1 Adding elements
9.8.2 Searching for elements in a list
9.8.3 Removing elements
9.8.4 Other methods
9.9 Two-dimensional lists
9.9.1 Ragged arrays
9.10 Aliasing
9.10.1 Reassigning variables
9.10.2 Does aliasing affect numbers?
9.11 Examples
9.11.1 Finding every element of a given value
9.11.2 Creating a 2-dimensional list of zeros

10 Using functions
10.1 Why use functions?
10.2 Built-in functions
10.2.1 repr
10.2.2 chr and ord
10.2.3 help and dir
10.3 Importing modules
10.3.1 Simple import statement
10.3.2 Importing individual functions
10.3.3 Aliasing a module
10.3.4 Importing all functions (don’t do this)
10.4 How to call functions
10.4.1 Optional parameters
10.4.2 Variable number of arguments
10.4.3 Named optional parameters
10.5 Defining your own functions
10.5.1 Printing @s
10.5.2 Printing more @s
10.5.3 Returning a value

11 More loops
11.1 The break operator
11.1.1 Break in a for loop
11.1.2 Break in a while loop
11.2 The continue operator
11.3 Using else with a loop
11.4 Nested loop statements
11.4.1 Printing times tables
11.5 Modifying a for loop
11.6 Looping in reverse order
11.6.1 Using range() to count backwards - ugly
11.6.2 reversed()
11.7 sorted()
11.8 Looping over multiple items
11.8.1 zip
11.8.2 How zip() works
11.9 More about zip()
11.10 Accessing the loop count using enumerate
11.11 Looping over selected items
11.11.1 Using filter
11.11.2 The advantage of using filter

12 Programming logic
12.1 Boolean types
12.2 Comparison operators and their opposites
12.3 Boolean operations and De Morgan’s Laws
12.4 Ternary operators
12.5 Comparing containers
12.5.1 Strings
12.5.2 Lists
12.5.3 Other containers
12.6 Membership testing
12.7 Identity testing
12.8 Truthy values
12.8.1 Numbers
12.8.2 Strings
12.8.3 Lists
12.8.4 Other collections
12.8.5 None
12.8.6 Other objects
12.9 Short circuit evaluation
12.9.1 Short-circuiting with the or operator
12.9.2 Short-circuiting with the and operator
12.9.3 Short-circuiting to avoid errors
12.9.4 The value of an or/and expression
12.9.5 Getting a true or false value

13 Slices
13.1 Slicing a list
13.2 Using negative indices
13.3 Delete or replace a slice of a list
13.4 Slicing tuples and strings
13.5 Loop over a slice
13.6 Using steps

14 More strings
14.1 Raw strings
14.2 Multi-line strings
14.3 Looping over a string
14.4 Joining strings
14.5 Splitting a string
14.6 Formatting strings
14.7 The in operator
14.8 Other string methods
14.8.1 Changing case
14.8.2 Dealing with whitespace
14.8.3 Padding
14.8.4 Search
14.8.5 Splitting strings
14.8.6 Categorising strings

15 Tuples
15.1 What is a tuple?
15.2 Creating a tuple
15.3 Accessing elements
15.4 Packing and unpacking tuples
15.4.1 Packing a tuple
15.4.2 Unpacking a tuple
15.4.3 Real-life examples
15.5 Tuple vs list operations
15.5.1 Tuple slices
15.5.2 Adding elements to a tuple
15.5.3 Finding elements
15.5.4 Removing elements
15.5.5 Looping
15.5.6 In case of emergency
15.6 Pros and cons of immutability

16 Exceptions
16.1 Program errors
16.2 What are exceptions
16.3 Exception types
16.3.1 ImportError
16.3.2 IndexError
16.3.3 TypeError
16.3.4 ValueError
16.3.5 ZeroDivisionError
16.4 Catching exceptions
16.4.1 Only catch exceptions you can handle
16.4.2 Accessing the exception message
16.5 Using else with exceptions
16.6 Using finally with exceptions
16.7 Throwing exceptions

17 Working with files
17.1 Using files
17.1.1 Opening the file
17.1.2 Reading and writing data
17.1.3 Closing the file
17.2 Reading data
17.2.1 Code for reading a file
17.2.2 Reading lines from a file
17.2.3 Looping over the lines in a file
17.3 Writing data
17.3.1 Code to write a file
17.3.2 The write function
17.4 Using with statements
17.5 CSV data
17.5.1 Reading CSV data
17.5.2 Trying the code
17.5.3 Formatting the output
17.5.4 Writing CSV data
17.5.5 Understanding the code
17.5.6 Trying the code